You’ve probably heard us say it many times before, but your email list is your most valuable marketing asset. But did you know its value extends beyond the inbox?

You can use your email list to create an Audience to promote ads to on Facebook. After all, it’d be silly to limit your marketing to one platform when it takes 5-7 times for a person to recognize your logo. A strong marketing strategy comes from using all the channels available to you in combination with one another.

There’s no denying the audience that Facebook provides. It’s massive.

As of the third quarter of 2018, Facebook had 2.27 billion monthly active users.

That’s a lot of eyeballs in one place!

A lot of businesses are taking advantage of this massive audience. 93% of marketers, which is around three million businesses, use Facebook advertising with regularity. Additionally, showing off its prowess as a global force, 70% of those businesses are based outside of the US.

The ability to target those ads by creating a Facebook Audience from your email list will help you to stand out from the crowd with more relevant ads.

What is a Facebook Audience?

Facebook allows you to upload an email list of customers and leads to its platform and compares your data with theirs to formulate an audience that you can target with ads.

How to Use Your Email List to Create a Facebook Audience

Let’s say your business has a special sale coming up.

Perhaps it’s for something around the holidays such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Hanukkah or New Year’s. It can also be for a new product launch or just because!

Whatever the occasion, you can use Facebook Audience to help promote your sale.

First, you’ll want to create your custom Facebook Audience by uploading your list of existing subscribers.

If you’re using Benchmark Email, you can now use Automation Pro to create an automation that will automatically upload new subscribers you add as you grow your email list to your Facebook Audience. You can also do this from your Contacts dashboard. We’ve put together a helpful FAQ to help you create a Facebook Audience with Automation Pro.

A 360° Marketing Approach to Your Facebook Audience

This is an email marketing blog, so first we’ll discuss using Facebook Ads in conjunction with your email marketing efforts. However, we will share some tips for Facebook Ads below.

As mentioned above, your marketing efforts will be most powerful when you combine your channels.

You should create a sequence of automated emails that match the messages in your Facebook Ads. That way, they’re reminded of your special sale at multiple touchpoints. It makes it all the more likely that you’ll convert those sales.

Here are a few tips for combining email marketing automation and Facebook Ads:

• Try to sync the messages. Think about when a subscriber might see the Facebook Ad or an email in the sequence. Make it feel like one complete story.
• Additionally, you need to make sure your branding is consistent down to the colors, font styles and voice in your copy.
• Don’t repeat yourself on both channels. Add some variety and give your subscribers a reason to follow you in each place. Offer a different perspective, make a new joke, anything that is going to add additional value for your customers and give them a reason to tune in.
• When a conversion happens, you may want to remove the buyer from your Facebook Audience list for that campaign. You don’t want to annoy them with ads after they’ve already made a purchase. Alternatively, you can add them to a new Facebook Audience with upsell ads.
• Facebook has an audience minimum of 10,000. If by uploading your subscribers, your audience isn’t large enough at first, feel free to add in more people by selecting from their audience settings. You can choose audience lookalikes and Facebook will find people on their network that share similar interests and profiles as your existing subscribers.

Following these tips will help you stay top of mind with your subscribers, grow stronger relationships with them faster and can even get your message in front of more eyes by using lookalike audiences on Facebook.

Tips for Facebook Ads

We’re obviously excited about the new Facebook Audience features available in Benchmark Email. However, we also took some time to compile some stats for you on Facebook Ads.

They say a picture is worth 1,000 words, but when it comes to Facebook Ads, images account for 75 to 90 percent of an ads effectivity and performance.

Keep it short and simple. An ad title is most effective at just four words and it only grows to 15 words when it comes to your link description.

When it comes to using video in a Facebook Ad, you have to get to your point quickly. According to Facebook, 47 percent of the value from your video comes from the first three seconds.

Wordstream conducted research to determine the average Cost Per Click (CPC) and Click-Through Rate (CTR) for Facebook Ads. They determined that the CPC was $1.72 on average for Facebook Ads and that the CTR was 0.9%. These numbers are important when it comes to knowing how effective your own Facebook Ads are in comparison to other businesses. However, their importance really only factors into your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) for a new customer. You can use a Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics to track your entire conversion funnel. This will tell you what your CPA is for your Facebook Ads. If your Customer Lifetime Value is high, a higher CPC or CTR will be more acceptable for your business.

Wrapping Up

Like Captain Planet, your marketing efforts are most effective “by your powers combined” from all your marketing channels.

Facebook Audiences let you easily combine your email marketing and Facebook Advertising efforts. It’s an incredibly effective strategy to better nurture relationships with your customers and subscribers. That’s why we’re all here, right?

We’ve put all this info into a helpful infographic as well. Share it up!

Do you have tips for Facebook Ads? Share them in the comments below!